A version of this review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Clint Eastwood isn’t exactly a guy known for his meditations on mortality. His characters tend to wade into treacherous situations without a second thought to their spiritual conditions or what might happen if they fall. So it is a bit unusual that the 80-year-old should make a film about a trio of people who can think of nothing else. That is until you come to see that the melancholy, meditative and haunting Hereafter isn’t about the hereafter so much as it is about those who are left here, after.

Hereafter follows the lives of three different people in three different countries, each, in their own way, obsessed with death and what lies beyond. There’s a hard-hitting French television reporter (Cécile De France) who, after nearly being killed in a devastating tsunami, finds herself suddenly obsessed with investigating the afterlife. In England, a pair of inseparable twins is separated by tragedy, leaving the more introverted of the two (Frankie McLaren) to pick up the pieces, including his mother’s debilitating drug and alcohol addiction. And in America, a reluctant psychic (Matt Damon), who considers his powers to communicate with the dead a curse rather than a gift (“A life that’s all about death is no life at all.”), tries in vain to find normalcy.

Eastwood, who far too often is given to heavy-handedness and blunt, obvious metaphors, is surprisingly subtle and gentle here. His traditionally sparse, stripped down method of storytelling isn’t afraid to linger over details that are not essential to the plot but are to the characters who populate it. It’s so refreshing to sit down to a contemplative filmmaker who is not remotely in a rush. Hereafter feels long, but never boring. Eastwood and longtime cinematographer, Tom Stern, paint with deep, brooding, gorgeous shadows, and while Eastwood, who always acts as his own composer, is known for his all-purpose, copy-and-paste scores, Hereafter is remarkably free of musical emotional cues.

While on-the-nose moments and the occasional sermonizing does crop up in screenwriter Peter Morgan’s (The Queen) script, it is not pervasive enough to spoil the film. Eastwood also manages to steer clear of the film’s inherent maudlin propensities, even as he and Morgan lazily and unskeptically regurgitate superstitious hokum (while admittedly showing that many who claim to be able to access the spirit world are interested only in accessing your bank account).

Eastwood doesn’t dwell on visions of the afterlife, though we are allowed a glimpse. His hereafter is far more impressionistic, ill defined and abstract than say Peter’s Jackson’s lavish interpretation of The Lovely Bones or Vincent Ward’s Technicolor concoction in What Dreams May Come. Hereafter is spiritual without being religious. Persuasion isn’t the point. One gets the sense that, if there is a hereafter, it is beyond the descriptive powers of any organized system of belief.

Some may be put off by the film’s lack of definable closure. While the characters’ narratives are resolved (a bit too conveniently perhaps and with a splendidly anachronistic and old fashioned ending), the film isn’t interested in answering the question of whether or not there is a hereafter (even the psychic, despite his heavenly backstage pass, has no more answers than those who come to him)—it is interested merely in asking the question. Whatever side of the issue you come down on, the fact remains that those left behind must carry on, must live for tomorrow, must honor their loved ones’ memories by bravely pushing through grief to find life and love on the other side. It is here that Hereafter is interested in dwelling.

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring: Matt Damon, Cécile de France, Frankie and George McLaren (Marcus/Jason), Jay Mohr, Bryce Dallas Howard
Rated PG-13 for disturbing images and strong language.
Running Time: 129 minutes